A History of Internet Outages [Hackaday]

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We heard a story that after the recent hurricane, a man noted that while the house was sweltering hot because the power was still out, his kids were more anxious for the internet to come back online. The Internet is practically a basic necessity for most people, but as you may have noticed with the recent CrowdStrike debacle, the Internet isn’t always reliable. Granted, the problem in that case wasn’t the Internet per se, but a problem with many critical hosts that provide services. [Thomas Germain] from the BBC took the opportunity to recall some of the more bizarre reasons we’ve had massive Internet outages in the past.

While teens after a hurricane might miss social media, global outages can be serious business. With 8.5 million computers dead, 911 services went down, medical surgeries were canceled, and — of course — around 46,000 flights were canceled in a single day. We have short memories for these outages, but as [Thomas] points out, this was far from the first massive outage, and many of them have very strange backstories.

How strange? Well, apparently, all of Armenia’s Internet depends on a single fiber optic cable. A 75-year-old woman in Georgia (the country, not the US state) sliced it with a spade while hunting for copper and took down the entire country. A few years later, a tractor in South Africa took out the Internet all across Zimbabwe. If those aren’t strange enough, sharks like to bite undersea cables, as you can see in the video below.

As the Internet becomes more entrenched in necessary services, we are surprised that there are not more requirements for dissimilar redundancy like those on a spacecraft or nuclear power plant. Even preventing third parties from pushing updates directly into production servers might have helped in this case. High-end data centers often have multiple network access points with different carriers. They also have generators or other means to deal with power outages. None of this helps, of course, if you depend on a group of servers that all get the same software updates and the update goes bad.

We don’t know why sharks hate undersea cables. We love them. If you want more specifics on the CrowdStrike event, our [Jonathan Bennett] has been following it for you.